Despite the enduring unpopularity of Obamacare, Congressional Democrats have up to now stood by their health care law, allowing that “it’s not perfect” but that they are proud of their votes to pass it. That all changed on Tuesday, when the Senate’s third-highest-ranking Democrat—New York’s Chuck Schumer—declared that “we took [the public’s] mandate and put all our focus on the wrong problem—health care reform…When Democrats focused on health care, the average middle-class person thought, ‘The Democrats aren’t paying enough attention to me.’”

Sen. Schumer made his remarks at the National Press Club in Washington. “Democrats blew the opportunity the American people gave them…Now, the plight of uninsured Americans and the hardships caused by unfair insurance company practices certainly needed to be addressed,” Schumer maintained. “But it wasn’t the change we were hired to make. Americans were crying out for the end to the recession, for better wages and more jobs—not changes in health care.”

“This makes sense,” Schumer continued, “considering 85 percent of all Americans got their health care from either the government, Medicare, Medicaid, or their employer. And if health care costs were going up, it really did not affect them. The Affordable Care Act was aimed at the 36 million Americans who were not covered. It has been reported that only a third of the uninsured are even registered to vote…it made no political sense.”

The response from Obama Democrats was swift. Many, like Obama speechwriters Jon Lovett and Jon Favreau and former National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor, took to Twitter. “Shorter Chuck Schumer,” said Vietor, “I wish Obama cared more about helping Democrats than sick people.”

Schumer’s Johnny-come-lately moment doesn’t get him off the hook. Schumer still voted for Obamacare. According to Jon Favreau, Schumer “was privately and publicly championing the Affordable Care Act in 2010.” But Schumer did in 2010 express some reservations about the law’s political effects.

Funny, I don't remember Chuck Schumer giving that advice when he was privately and publicly championing the Affordable Care Act in 2010

“I don’t begrudge Obama choosing” health care reform as a priority, Schumer told Jeffrey Toobin of the New Yorker in August 2010, a few months before another midterm drubbing. “Even though if I were President I might not have…You had to relate health care to the average middle-class person, and why it would help them. And 75 percent of Americans have health care that they are fundamentally—I wouldn’t say happy with, but not unhappy with it.”

Obamacare was never designed to help the middle class

In one of his now-infamous YouTube videos, MIT economist and Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber said that Schumer was someone who “as far as I can tell, doesn’t understand economics.” But Schumer clearly understands politics, and has started to raise the concern that has been raised regularly on these pages: that Obamacare forces average Americans to pay more in taxes, and more in health insurance premiums, at a time when their taxes and premiums aren’t exactly low to begin with.

As Prof. Gruber points out, Democrats could have written a bill that tackled the problem of high health care costs, but they chose not to. "Barack Obama’s not a stupid man, okay? He knew when he was running for president that quite frankly the American public doesn’t actually care that much about the uninsured...What the American public cares about is costs. And that’s why even though the bill that they made is 90 percent health insurance coverage and 10 percent about cost control, all you ever hear people talk about is cost control."

Obama famously promised that his plan would reduce "premiums for the average family by $2,500 per year." Instead, the government estimates that the average family faces increased costs. Obama promised his plan wouldn't raise taxes on the middle class. Instead, it did, by hundreds of billions of dollars.

Gruber declared in 2009 that Obamacare would "for sure" reduce individually-purchased premiums; two years later, he was quietly telling state governments that the opposite would happen.

Democrats could have passed a much less disruptive, bipartisan plan to offer tax credits to the uninsured, without driving up costs for everyone else. They chose not to.

INVESTORS’ NOTE: The biggest publicly-traded players in Obamacare’s health insurance exchanges are Aetna (NYSE:AET), Humana (NYSE:HUM), Cigna (NYSE:CI), Molina (NYSE:MOH), WellPoint (NYSE:WLP), and Centene (NYSE:CNC), in order of the number of uninsured exchange-eligible Americans for whom their plans are available.

I am Forbes' Policy Editor, and president of a non-partisan think tank, the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP.org), which develops policy reform ideas to expand economic opportunity to those who least have it. I'm on Twitter at @Avik. My work has also...